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The brother of Iraqi lawmaker Efan al-Esawi grieves over the coffin of his brother during a funeral for the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc member in Falluja, 50 km (31 miles) west of Baghdad, January 16, 2013. A suicide bomber killed the Iraqi Sunni Muslim lawmaker as he visited a construction site on Tuesday, threatening to deepen a crisis over Sunni protests against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Posing as a worker, the attacker hugged Esawi before detonating an explosive vest to kill the politician, who once campaigned against al Qaeda after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, police and local officials said. REUTERS/Mohanned Faisal

WASHINGTON - In a matter of days, Hillary Clinton will leave the State Department behind and become a private citizen for the first time in 34 years. But her next big decision will be a very public one: whether to run for U.S. president in 2016.

Members of the Royal Air Force Air Movement Services push a pallet loaded with French Army rations off a C17 cargo aircraft after delivering it to Bamako, Mali, January 16, 2013. The Royal Air Force is lending logistical support to France as it sends forces to Mali. REUTERS/Andrew Winning

BERLIN - Germany will make two Transall transport planes available to fly troops from the West African bloc ECOWAS to Mali's capital Bamako to help in the fight against Islamist rebels, the German government said on Wednesday.

"Germany will provide logistical support," Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in a joint statement with Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. The Germans have ruled out sending combat troops to Mali.

Ivory Coast's President Alassane Ouattara, who currently holds the rotating chairmanship of ECOWAS, was in Berlin on Wednesday for talks with German officials including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Maria Alyokhina, a member of the female punk band "Pussy Riot", attends a court hearing in Berezniki in Perm region, near the Ural mountains, January 16, 2013. According to local media, the Berezniki City Court is expected to hear her motion to postpone carrying out the rest of her sentence because of her young child at home. Alyokhina is serving a sentence for staging an anti-Kremlin protest on the altar of Moscow's main Russian Orthodox church. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

JERUSALEM - In decline since the peace it sought with the Palestinians unraveled into violence, Israel's Labour Party looks set to regain some lost ground in next week's election after waging an economy-focused campaign.

Opinion polls forecast an easy victory for conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday's vote, which may push Israel further to the right, if as widely expected, he then enlists pro-settler and religious allies to his coalition.

But center-left Labour, bolstered by public discontent with high living costs and the flagging political fortunes of the once-governing centrist Kadima party, seems poised for its strongest parliamentary showing in years.

Netanyahu has made Israel's security the main campaign issue of his right-wing Likud party, fielding a joint list of candidates with the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party.

Jewish ultranationalists take part in a march in the northern Israeli-Arab village of Musmus, organised by leaders of the far-right party "Otzma Leisrael" under the slogan "Without duties there are no rights", January 15, 2013. REUTERS/Baz Ratne

Students hold rubber guns during a bodyguard training session at Tianjiao Special Guard/Security Consultant Ltd. Co in Beijing January 16, 2013. Some 45 people took part in the 21 days' intensive training camp teaching Israel martial arts, mind-reading, scouting, driving, anti-terrorism skills and business etiquette. Trainees are former soldiers, college graduates and retired athletes who intend to become bodyguards or simply strengthen their physical fitness. REUTERS/China Daily

BRUSSELS - It's been called a tightrope walk, an attempt to thread a needle in the dark and like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. The classical allusion may be a stretch, but one way or the other, Britain's David Cameron faces a tough ask on Europe.

When he stands up to speak at 10 a.m. on Friday, the prime minister will confront a highly expectant audience, not just in the room before him in Amsterdam, but on TV across Europe and particularly on the other side of the Channel at home.

In Brussels, diplomats confess to a mixture of apprehension and hopefulness - they don't expect Cameron to turn his back on Europe, but how firmly will he make the case for British involvement in the EU? And how much criticism will he have to heap on Brussels to placate a deeply skeptical electorate?

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (R) and his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Tan Dung review the guard of honour during a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi January 16, 2013. Abe is in Hanoi for a two-day visit to Vietnam, the first leg of his Asian tour to Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. The last time he was prime minister of Japan, Abe's inaugural foreign trip was to China. In the job again 7 years later and relations with Beijing now chilly, Abe is turning first this time to the rising economic stars of Southeast Asia. REUTERS/Hoang Dinh Nam/Pool

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell sits inside a car upon his arrival at Haneda airport in Tokyo January 16, 2013. The United States sent its top Asian diplomacy and security officials to South Korea and Japan to calm tensions between two U.S. allies whose squabbling has frustrated efforts to deal with a troublesome North Korea and an increasingly assertive China. REUTERS/Toru Hanai

KHARTOUM - Four Chinese workers abducted at the weekend in Sudan's western Darfur region have been released, officials and diplomats said on Wednesday.

Unknown gunmen had kidnapped the Chinese - one engineer and three drivers working for a road construction company - together with five Sudanese colleagues on Saturday near al-Fasher in North Darfur.

"The Sudanese government managed to release the four Chinese in Darfur after intensified negotiations with the kidnappers," China's ambassador to Sudan, Luo Xiaoguang, told Reuters. "They are in good health."

Supporters of Sufi cleric and leader of the Minhaj-ul-Quran religious organisation Muhammad Tahirul Qadri read newspapers in the early morning of their third day of protests in Islamabad January 16, 2013. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood

Smoke rises from debris as police and emergency services attend the scene of a helicopter crash in Vauxhall, south London January 16, 2013. British police said two people had been killed. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

KIRKUK, Iraq - A suicide bomber killed 15 people in Iraq's Kirkuk on Wednesday after detonating a explosives-packed truck outside a Kurdish party office in the city at the centre of a dispute between Baghdad and the country's autonomous Kurdistan.

Shoppers and police helped drag bloodied survivors out of the rubble and wrecked vehicles after the huge blast tore through a commercial street in Kirkuk, near the local headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party or KDP.

The attack came as Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is locked in a feud with ethnic Kurds in the north over disputed oilfields and also facing Sunni Muslim protesters in a western province calling for him to step down.

Afghan security forces investigate at the site of car bomb attack in Kabul January 16, 2013. A car bomb exploded in front of the gates of the Afghan intelligence agency on Wednesday, Reuters witnesses said, near heavily barricaded government buildings and Western embassies. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

PARIS - In five days, France's mercy dash to Mali to stop al Qaeda-linked Islamists seizing the capital has bounced it into a promise to keep troops there until its West African former colony is finally back on its feet.

Exactly how long that will take is hard to say. But Africa's latest war is likely to entail a long stay for France with an exit strategy that will depend largely on allies who have yet to prove they are ready for the fight.

In a country where newspapers usually toe the government line, the defiance by the Beijing News was remarkable. Not since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests had reporters banded together in such a dramatic way for the cause of press freedom.

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 (Reuters) - At least 82 students in Syria were killed on Tuesday in two explosions that rocked the university in Aleppo, Syria's biggest city, Syria's U.N. envoy told the U.N. Security Council.

"A cowardly terrorist act targeted the students of Aleppo University as they sat for their midterm examinations. This act killed 82 students and wounded 162 other students," Syria's U.N. ambassador, Bashar Ja'afari, told the council during a debate on counter-terrorism.

The cause of the explosions was not clear but the government and opposition activists blamed each other.

BAMAKO, Jan 15 (Reuters) - A column of French armoured vehicles has left the Malian capital Bamako, heading north towards territory controlled by Islamist rebels, a French military official said on Tuesday.

"A convoy of armoured vehicles left this afternoon heading north," the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters without providing further details.

It was the first such movement since France began a military operation on Friday to halt a southward advance by the alliance of Islamist groups.

The flag-draped coffin of French lieutenant Damien Boiteux of the 4th helicopter special forces regiment, who was killed during the French intervention in Mali, is carried by pallbearers into the courtyard of the Invalides during a national ceremony of homage in Paris January 15, 2013. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

DAKAR, Jan 15 (Reuters) - A powerful southern offensive by Islamists in Mali last week, halted only by French air strikes, showed that a loose alliance of rebels from al Qaeda's North African wing and local groups has been united by the threat of foreign intervention.

When the coalition of Islamists swept across northern Mali last year, massacring army troops and carving up the vast desert zone, ties between Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and local groups Ansar Dine and MUJWA had looked opportunistic, and regional mediators believed they could prize them apart.

Some fighters imposed strict Islamic law and recruited foreigners and locals hungry for jihad, others framed the conflict around local Malian tribal politics and religion, while criminal networks smuggling drugs and contraband joined the fray, earning them the title "gangster jihadists".

WASHINGTON No negotiations can be held with North Korea until it improves its behavior, a White House official said on Wednesday, raising questions about U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's offer to begin talks with Pyongyang any time and without pre-conditions. | Video

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